For Shopify brands, the Holiday season is about more than preparing for a spike in traffic. It’s also one of the biggest opportunities to rethink how customers discover, buy, send and receive gifts. As gifting volume climbs into December, brands have to balance a smoother, more thoughtful gifting experience with the added apps, features and functionality that can put pressure on site performance.
We spoke with Nick Kennedy, co-founder of Giftnote, a Shopify gifting platform used by more than 1,100 stores, to unpack what brands often get wrong about gifting, where the biggest opportunities are being missed, and how teams can prepare their stores for a faster, higher-converting Holiday season.
Amelia Trumble: Much like Render Better, Giftnote was a side hustle born out of an agency that has now spun off into its own thing! Can you give us some background on how that all came about and what Giftnote is today?
Nick Kennedy: Giftnote came out of Elephant Room, a Sydney performance marketing and Shopify agency. I ran partnerships there for several years, mostly tech partnerships across the Shopify ecosystem. Matt is one of the founders at ER and one of the co-founders at Giftnote.
The idea started as a client problem. A merchant wanted gift messaging at scale and their 3PL quoted a number that made it impossible. Printed notes don't work at volume. At the same time Matt and I had our first sons five days apart, deep in Sydney lockdown. Every gift that turned up was an anonymous brown box. No note, no sender. We were texting friends asking if the socks were theirs.
So we built the digital version. The message is tied to the Shopify order and delivered when the carrier confirms the parcel landed. Giftnote today is a gifting platform for Shopify, not a gift message widget. Three products: gift messages, gift cards, and multi-recipient corporate gifting. Around 1,100 Shopify stores use it, across 800,000 gift orders and $90M+ in tracked gifted revenue. Bootstrapped, and still run out of the agency.
Amelia: You are obviously coming up to your most important time of the year - the Holidays! What changes in customer behaviour do you see in regard to shopping and using the gifting feature during peak season?
Nick: Most Shopify brands treat Black Friday Cyber Monday as the peak and then coast. BFCM is a peak. It isn't the peak. Gifting volume on Giftnote climbs steadily from late November right through to December 25th.
We see gift card purchases on Christmas morning. Someone's realised they've forgotten a person, and a digital gift card is the only product that can still land that day. If a store can't sell one at 9am on the 25th, that's revenue walking out the door.
The behavioural shift underneath it: people spend more on others than they spend on themselves, and that holds even when they're tightening up on their own basket. Gift orders on Giftnote run 20 to 25% above self-purchase AOV. That happens in the four weeks most brands have already stopped optimising.
So the pattern for peak season is a long tail, not a single spike, and most Shopify stores go quiet during the exact window where gifting is peaking.
"Most Shopify brands treat BFCM as the peak and then coast...Gifting volume climbs steadily from Nov right through to Dec 25th."
Amelia: From your experience working with Shopify brands, where do you see friction most often in the gifting journey for customers - from product discovery through checkout and delivery? And how does Giftnote help?
Nick: Four places, and they're consistent across the merchant base:
The thread running through all four: most Shopify stores have no idea who their gift recipients are. That's the biggest gap in the journey.
Amelia: What are some of the biggest mistakes or missed opportunities you see brands make when preparing their gifting experience for Holiday?
Nick: Turning gifting on in November. Gifting is a channel, not a checkbox. The brands that win in December had the gift collection, the landing page and the email flows live in September.
Not knowing their number. I've asked Shopify brands doing serious volume what percentage of their orders are gifts and had nobody able to answer. And the answer varies enormously. For some brands it's a few percent. For others it's 40, 60, 90% of everything they sell, and they've never once built the site around it. It depends entirely on the category, the product and the price point. The point isn't the benchmark, it's that almost nobody can tell you their own figure, and you can't build for a channel you can't measure.
Ignoring the recipient. Every gift order creates two people and most brands only capture one. The recipient has been hand-picked by someone who knows their taste and they're holding the product. Then they disappear into a void because the store only has a shipping address.
Gift cards with no reminder flow. Around 60% of gift cards go unredeemed. A Klaviyo reminder sequence recovers a meaningful chunk, and gift card holders spend roughly 30% over the card value when they do redeem.
And launching new apps and features in November without a performance check. Which is Render Better's whole point.
Amelia: As brands add gifting features, promotions, apps, and other functionality ahead of peak season, how should they think about balancing a richer customer experience with site performance?
Nick: You don't have to choose between experience and speed. You have to be deliberate about placement.
Giftnote can sit on the product page, cart, checkout or post-checkout. If a merchant is protecting PDP and cart performance, put it at checkout. The intent is already there, no first-paint page is carrying it, and the gift still gets captured. Post-checkout works too and costs the storefront nothing.
The same discipline applies to every app in the stack. Audit in September, not December. Every store has apps installed from a test two years ago still loading scripts sitewide. One job, one app. Uninstall properly rather than deactivating in the admin.
Then measure it rather than guessing, which is where a tool like Render Better earns its place, because app bloat is invisible until someone puts a number on it.
Last thing, test on a real phone on a real network. The December gifter is shopping at 11pm on mobile with a deadline. If the page takes six seconds they never see the gift option, and no amount of CRO work upstream saves that order.
"Every gift order creates two people and most brands only capture one.”
Amelia: Can you share with us one of your proudest Giftnote moments? Can you share a customer who absolutely crushed it with their gifting execution?
Nick: The proudest thing is when Giftnote comes back to us secondhand. It shows up in merchant evaluation calls now. Someone on the brand side received a gift through Giftnote, or sent one, and they walk into the meeting saying "we had this experience, we need it on our site." That's a better pitch than anything we've written.
On execution, the standout is a Shopify brand converting 22% of their gift recipients into paying customers. Before Giftnote those people were shipping addresses. Now the recipient gets a branded message the moment the parcel lands, opts in, and better than one in five come back and buy for themselves. Their line was "this is exactly why we bought the platform."
That's the whole thesis of gift-driven acquisition. The gifter is often a one-off purchase. The recipient is the customer the brand didn't know it had acquired.
Amelia: In terms of site KPIs, how could leaning into gifting unlock other areas of a DTC business? Is it just a customer acquisition play or can gifting help across all site KPIs?
Nick: Gifting is much bigger than acquisition, and the most underrated part is marketing efficiency.
Once a brand can tell a gifter apart from a recipient, it can stop wasting spend. Someone bought a gift, don't retarget them for six weeks with the product they just sent to someone else. If a bloke bought lingerie for his partner in December, don't market lingerie to him for the rest of the year. Plenty of DTC brands are burning Meta budget retargeting people who were never the customer.
Run that data the other way and the segments get sharp. Gifters, gift recipients, and self-buyers are three audiences with three different messages, and most Shopify stores treat them as one list.
The other KPIs move too. Gift AOV runs 20 to 25% above self-purchase. Gifting grows the email and SMS list from a source that costs nothing in media. Gift cards affect cash flow and repeat rate at the same time.
The one underneath all of it is attribution. Without it, December just happens to you.
“The recipient is the customer the brand didn't know it had acquired.”
Amelia: Aside from Render Better (obv!), share with us some other apps / SAAS solutions that brands should also be considering on-boarding for Holiday?
Nick: Render Better first, and I'd say that even if we weren't doing this together, because site speed quietly taxes every other app in the stack.
A delivery scheduling tool like Flare, so customers can choose the arrival date and order ahead. For gifting that's the difference between a present landing on the right day and landing on the 27th.
An order editing app like Orderediting.com. No brainer. Peak season is when customers change their mind, change the address, or add a gift they forgot, and every one of those becomes a support ticket or a refund if it can't be handled in-app.
Klaviyo underneath all of it, because most of the gifting value only lands if the flows exist. Giftnote pushes gifter and recipient profiles straight into Klaviyo for exactly that reason.
Amelia: If you could give Shopify brands three recommendations for creating a faster, smoother, higher-converting gifting experience this Holiday season, what would they be?
Nick: Build the gifting path before October. Gift collection in the nav, a dedicated gifting landing page, filters by price and occasion. Shopify Sidekick will build the collections and pages for you, and it's worth asking it directly how to improve the gifting experience on your store. Cheap, fast, and most merchants haven't thought to try it.
Audit your apps and your load times now, with Render Better or equivalent. Put your gifting solution where it earns its place, and use checkout or post-checkout placement if you're protecting storefront speed. December is not the month to find out your cart takes five seconds on mobile.
Market to three audiences, not one. Gifters, gift recipients and self-buyers behave differently and want different things. Once you can tell them apart, every downstream metric gets more efficient.
“December is not the month to find out your cart takes five seconds on mobile.”
Amelia: Thanks for all of these amazing insights, Nick! Check out Giftnote to maximize your gifting opportunities this Holiday season: www.giftnote.com.
See how Render Better can help you uncover performance issues, prioritize what matters, and create a smoother, higher-converting customer experience. Schedule a demo today.